emjhenry's blog

My final project is an essay exploring ideas about technology paranoia as we've seen in several of the works we studied. I wanted to allow myself some blank space to to just think out some ideas about why people are afraid of technology, especially virtual reality, and why it shows up in such strong media images as The Lawnmower Man's ridiculous psycho internet murderer plot, or the massive scary war in The Matrix. I read a blog entry by Henry Jenkins that is about Second Life, actually, that I found very relevant while I was writing this, so I ended up quoting some of the discussion from there. The entry was about how Second Life is sometimes heralded as the coming of the Virtual Age, when everything will be totally and completely immersive and virtual a la Snow Crash or Feed or something similar, and how that's a really wrongheaded conception of Second Life, because people pattern their internet behaviors after their real-life behaviors, so all virtual reality can really end up doing is reinforcing the real world with its secondary structures.  read more »

We decided to base our ARG off of an existing work, reasoning that it would be easier to work with existing mythology than it would be to create our own, and it very much was - using Children of Men as a template gave us a world to start from, and it directed our creativity in productive ways. What took the most time to brainstorm was what the "point" of the game would be - we knew the plot and we knew the player's role, but we weren't sure how to end the game in a sort of "You made it!" kind of way, maybe because most of the ARGs we've been studying are still running. Also, creating such a small-scale ARG actually created logistical problems - if it can be solved so quickly, what can really get accomplished by the end? What we came up with hopefully creates the sense that the plot has unfolded over a period of time, whereas the player's involvement is not at all time-sensitive.  read more »

I wanted to do a game about a little boy who plays pretend. What I found in the course of making the game was that any and all of the things I hoped to accomplish had to be whittled down to be feasible. I wanted reality to shift, I wanted objects to change, I wanted things and people to move at a moment’s notice, and pretty much all of those things proved incredibly difficult if not impossible. Programming with Inform was a lot like slogging up a mountain in the snow. Much longer and I think I would have frozen to death or maybe run out of oxygen. However, like climbing a mountain, there was definitely a sense of accomplishment at the end. I am very pleased to have written something functional using this program. I had a lot of trouble with the if/otherwise clause, and no amount of manual surfing or internet searching helped for a long, long time. The easiest part of this assignment was the writing; trying to make the program as flexible as my imagination was the hardest. I had to visually represent my complex map for myself with labels and floorplans, because the syntax of Inform was such that I could not visualize what my world looked like by reading my script alone.  read more »

I played “Berrost’s Challenge,” which is massively more complex than either of the games we’ve played so far, and also much more of a “game” than a story, in that there are points and stats, settings, NPCs, and ways to “lose” as opposed to die. It is set in medieval times, with a sorcerer’s apprentice who is charged with finding five magic spell scrolls, each of which is cleverly hidden and takes puzzles to unlock and acquire. Unlike a comparable game with a visual interface, I had no ready idea what commands were available to me, or which aspects of my environment were interactive. It took a lot of trail and error and also looking at the hint sheet for me to even begin to unlock the puzzles. Now, this could be mostly due to my unfamiliarity with the genre, but it seems to me that interactive fiction affords much more user-friendly setups than the one that “Berrost’s Challenge” has here. On the other hand, those looking for a challenge with lots of little technical parts, as opposed to a fluid narrative, will probably find what they are looking for.  read more »

Wow, is Inform tough. I feel like I'm learning some high level of formal logic. I know what I want my game to do, but hunting through the program manual for the code to make those things happen is quite the task. I'm fairly sure I still have no idea what I'm doing. So far my strategy has been to write out all the descriptions and plot ideas as normal text, outside of Inform, and to then carefully look up the right syntax in which to couch those descriptions and actions. This project will possibly take me the rest of my life at this rate. But it will be good. You know, in theory. I almost feel like an easier way to do this would be to hopskotch through other games, taking chunks of code that do the things I want my game to do. However, that's a different class of work in itself and I am already in the midst of wading through this manual. I guess we will see what happens. Is anyone else dealing primarily with the "change" verb? I'd be interested to know what strategies you are using to get things done.  read more »

Oh man oh man, did this take me back. I spent large chunks of my middle school experience playing fantasy MOOs and MUXs, etc., mostly based on Anne McCaffrey's Pern series - one in particular that was called "VirtuaPern." I remember rooms being color-coded based on component, and I remember using a client called straight-up "Telnet" to connect. You couldn't hit backspace, so if you mistyped you would have to delete the entire line and start over. I spent a lot of time in middle school and elementary school trying to find ways to interact even more directly with books, which led me to Choose-Your-Own-Adventures and text-based RPGs on journals and in chatrooms. It's sort of a hack-and-slash way to enter a story - I feel that in a way alternative text stuff like this will always be weighed down by the medium. Rather than simply deepening the experience of reading a continuous block of text like a novel, interactive games of the sort we have been playing offer a similar but definitely separate kind of involvement with a story.  read more »

I decided to draw the ideas for my website pretty directly out of The Lawnmower Man, conceiving it as a kind of continuation of the movie's world. Jobe has made his own prediction come true; he controls the internet, which more or less means that he controls the world. My website persona, like everybody else in his world, lives under Jobe's thumb. Freedom of speech is fairly restricted; to represent this, I put most of my information in weird places, like alt tags, instructional HTML, and in the titles, which are in binary both to act as a "secret" code and to show how much more in tune with programming and computers everyone is in Jobe's world. In order to express himself, my persona has to use a series of nontraditional ways to communicate, which includes the pictures that are the main way to navigate through his website.  read more »

****vaguely spoilery****
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What a unique experience. I've never played a text-based game with so much atmosphere before - maybe because my text adventure heyday was in middle school - but I really enjoyed everything that Shade had to share with me. From the too-bright light on, I got a bad feeling, and I cringed every time one of my possessions turned to sand. It was truly creepy and I was trying to think about why; beyond the descriptions, comments like "You don't want the dark" when you try to turn off the light, I think it has to do with the details that changed out from under me. I'm used to text games that have an entirely static environment. When even items that I'm holding can change, it makes things seem very unreliable and scary. I kept looking around me over and over, paranoid that something had changed. And usually it had. In a way I could have used more of those unreliable details, though I see the reasoning behind the spare setup of the game. I just wanted more to play with, basically, and I wanted more chances to be involved.  read more »